Omar Bongo

El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba, the president of Gabon and Africa's longest-entrenched autocrat, died at age 73 in a Spanish hospital in June 2009 after suffering cardiac arrest. As ruler of the small West African nation of Gabon for 41 years, Mr. Gabon became immensely wealthy in office while serving as France's key point man in the region.

The Gabonese government had denied that Mr. Bongo had serious health problems until its announcement of his death on June 8, 2009, though several reports had suggested he had cancer.

Mr. Bongo came to power when Lyndon Johnson was still president, a sharp-eyed disciple of the first generation of African leaders who presided over an oil boom that fueled an extravagant life for himself and his family - dozens of luxurious properties in and around Paris, a $500 million presidential palace, fancy cars - but did not lift his country out of the region's grinding poverty.

Under Mr. Bongo's rule, Gabon never had a coup or a civil war, a rare achievement for a nation surrounded by unstable, war-torn states. Fueled by oil, the country's economy was more like that of an Arabian emirate than a Central African nation. For many years Gabon was said, perhaps apocryphally, to have the world's highest per capita consumption of Champagne.

Like other absolute rulers on the continent, Mr. Bongo curtailed dissent, opposition and the press. But unlike many others his authoritarian rule was softened by money from the rich offshore oil fields, and his style was to co-opt or buy off opponents rather than crush them outright. That made him a more respectable ally in the region for France, which maintains a military base in the capital Libreville, has extensive oil interests in the country, and has always, since the days of Charles de Gaulle, considered Mr. Bongo France's "special partner," in the words of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Last year the French president demoted his minister in charge of looking after the ex-colonies, Jean-Marie Bockel, after the latter noted the "squandering of public funds" by some African regimes, provoking Mr. Bongo's fury.

Mr. Bongo had been angry with his old partner for several years, since French public-interest groups first filed legal complaints against him and two other well-entrenched African leaders alleging "misuse of public funds" over their sumptuous property holdings in France.

That Mr. Bongo chose a hospital in Barcelona, Spain, instead of France, for treatment of an unspecified condition, was taken by many as proof of his anger over this upheaval. The anger intensified earlier this month when an investigating magistrate in Paris, Françoise Desset, ruled that the complaints against Mr. Bongo and the other two African rulers, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Congo, and Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea, could go forward.

While some opposition figures spoke of a possible coup d'état on Mr. Bongo's death or prolonged absence, a French expert on Africa and Gabon, Philippe Hugon of the Institut de Relations Internationales et Strategiques, said that was unlikely.

Mr. Bongo had "lost legitimacy," Mr. Hugon said, "even if there is no real opposition."

Mr. Bongo was a self-proclaimed nature lover in a country with the largest percentage of untrammeled virgin jungle of all the nations in the Congo basin. In 2002, he set aside 10 percent of Gabon's land as national parks, pledging that they would never be logged, mined, hunted or farmed. But Mr. Bongo threw that commitment into doubt by backing an iron ore mining venture which threatened to destroy a huge waterfall known as Kongou Falls by damming the Ivindo River to power a mine and its railway.

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